Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Still going strong in 2021

Although a behemoth in Asia, Oppo is still relatively new to Western markets. The past two years have seen a few high-profile launches for the brand, but Oppo still has a way to go in terms of brand recognition and perception in Europe.

So last year, the company simplified its smartphone portfolio, positioning the Find X line as its main high-end brand. Launched a year ago in spring 2020, the Oppo Find X2 Pro isn't an outlandish, borderline experimental device like the original Find X. Instead, Oppo's goal has just been to build a really solid, top-to-bottom Android flagship that ticks every possible box.

And having spent some time getting to know the Find X2 Pro, it's clear to me that this is still one of the best Android phones of the moment.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Price and Availability

In addition to being available unlocked on Amazon UK for £799, the Oppo Find X2 Pro can be found on Carphone Warehouse in the UK, with contract deals on Vodafone starting at £39 per month. The amount you'll pay upfront largely depends on your chosen data plan. For £19.99 upfront, you'll get a 100GB plan with 5G connectivity. Meanwhile, an unlimited plan will set you back £51 per month with the same £19.99 upfront fee. As is typical in the UK, you can tweak your monthly fee and upfront charge to suit your own personal preferences.

While on-contract plans for the Find X2 Pro aren't exactly cheap, the phone is considerably more affordable than many 2021 flagships like the Galaxy S21 Ultra when purchased with a service plan.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Hardware and Design

Some fans of the original Find X may be disappointed by the move towards a more traditional smartphone design in the follow-up, but the newly slab-shaped, motor-free Find X2 Pro is incredibly well put together. I've been using the Find X2 Pro in orange "vegan leather," which is effectively fancy textured polycarbonate. Sure, any amount of close inspection reveals that this is indeed plastic and not leather. But having used countless glass and metal slabs over the past year, the new material is a breath of fresh air. The outer frame is still fashioned from glossy, polished metal, with a stylized depressed oval shape top and bottom. On the model I've been using, the golden hue complements the orange back panel.

The unique texture of the Find X2 Pro also helps with grip — useful in such a large phone — making it among the least fingerprinty devices I've used of late.

Should you want a more conventional look for your phone, there's also a ceramic-backed Find X2 Pro, which I used briefly at the device's London launch event, and probably feels more like the phone in your pocket right now.

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As much as the vegan leather coating dominates the rear of the Find X2 Pro, it's also home to a chunky vertical camera protrusion, which houses a triple-lens array, and a metal Oppo badge down below. I had been concerned that this would quickly pick up knocks and scrapes, but in my first few weeks of use, it's held up pretty well — just one minor scratch towards the bottom of the badge. (Though granted, a decent chunk of that time has been spent indoors owing to the current global health situation.)

Nevertheless, this is an exceptionally pretty phone and one that manages to stand out thanks to its choice of materials and the impressive execution of its design. The hand feel is comfortable, and I found grip and reachability to be less challenging than other similarly sized phones. Haptic feedback, too, is top-notch, with satisfyingly firm taps.

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On the inside, the Find X2 Pro is equally impressive. It's powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865 processor with integrated 5G, along with 12GB of RAM and 256 or 512GB of storage (I've been using the 512GB version).

Oppo's also shipping a standard, non-Pro Find X2, which downgrades the water-resistance spec, the memory, and some of the cameras, to keep the price down.

Oppo Find X2 series hardware specifications

Oppo Find X2 Pro Display

This phone's star attraction is, without a doubt, its display. It's a 6.7-inch Quad HD+ OLED panel packed with proprietary Oppo technology and a glorious 120Hz refresh rate. As you'll know if you've read our Samsung Galaxy S20 series reviews, a high refresh rate like this will instantly ruin any other phone screen for you. The extra fluidity of a high refresh rate and the accompanying 240Hz touch sampling rate is a revelation for smartphone performance.

Bezels are minimal, with only the slightest hint of a "chin" area down below and a subtle curve to the glass surface on the horizontal. The only blemish is the hole-punch selfie camera in the top left corner. This may be a turn-off for some, but it is sure to be one of the major smartphone trends of the year, and I've long since made my peace with the idea that these things are going to be around for the foreseeable future. Even in video playback and photo viewing, where the whole screen is in play, I haven't been particularly bothered by it.

The display is also extensively configurable, from basic tweaks like white balance and color vibrance to the "O1 Ultra Vision Engine," which can upscale non-HDR and lower-frame-rate video content to up to 120Hz with HDR.

The 120 nits of peak local brightness (or 800 nits total across the panel) also makes for easy daylight visibility, while the lowest brightness levels combined with Dark Mode can help with comfortable late-night viewing.

Anecdotally, I've also found the battery hit of using 120Hz mode (or more accurately, Oppo's Auto Select mode, which dynamically switches from 60-120Hz), to be fairly minimal. The extra hertz are definitely not free, and if battery life is your top priority, then you'll want to stick to the lower refresh rate. But the dilemma of battery life versus display smoothness really hasn't been the source of much anxiety for me.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Battery Life

The Oppo Find X2 Pro packs an ample 4,260mAh battery inside. But it's also a 5G phone with a fast refresh rate and a ton of other whizbang features. As such, I've found battery life to be reliable for around a full day's use, but not one of the best Android devices I've used in terms of longevity. With my usage, I'm getting a comfortable four-ish hours of screen-on time across a full day of use. That's fine for me most of the time, but for heavy users, this isn't a two-day phone.

That's not such a big deal, though, considering the speed of Oppo's SuperVOOC 2.0 65W wired charging. You'll need to use the special charging brick and cable bundled in the box, but doing so can get you out of the danger zone in just a few minutes. I've stopped worrying about charging overnight because I know that however low the charge is in the morning, I can be back in action in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee.

For a full charge from dead, Oppo quotes 38 minutes, which broadly matches with my experience.

Finally, the one trade-off in this department: there's no wireless charging on offer here, which is somewhat disappointing when the likes of Huawei and OnePlus are pushing Qi charging to even quicker charging speeds. But if you're happy to stick to wired, you'll get the fastest refills in any smartphone we've so far tested.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Software and Performance

Before using the Find X2 Pro, it'd been a good few years since I'd used an Oppo phone with the company's Android-based ColorOS. To put it mildly, I did not have fond memories of the software: It was overbearing, ugly, and rife with app-breaking bugs.

Fortunately, none of the above applies to the latest ColorOS — version 11, based on Android 11. To my surprise, I've actually enjoyed using Oppo's software during my time with the phone. Just like Samsung and LG, Oppo has its own distinctive visual style, with green hues, clean whites, and stylized wireframe icons. It's all very easy on the eyes. ColorOS's core apps and UI are pleasantly animated, and thanks to the speedy processor and display, the Find X2 Pro absolutely flies.

That exceptional performance extends to the phone's biometrics. I've found the new, larger optical fingerprint scanner more reliable and slightly faster than the previous generation, especially when using fingers other than my right thumb. The same goes for the face unlock feature, which admittedly isn't as secure as 3D scanning systems used in the iPhone, Google Pixel 4, and others.

I've also found some genuinely useful features in ColorOS, particularly around multitasking. A three-fingered swipe easily splits the screen into multi-window mode — far easier than the multiple taps required to do this in vanilla Android. And as of ColorOS 11, there's a fully-fledged windowed mode that's supported in most apps, letting you collapse them down into a floating window or minimize them into a chat head-style bubble.

Meanwhile, the preloaded Oppo Relax app comes with soothing ambient sounds and visuals for guided breathing, as well as ambient music and white noise tracks. It sounds like a small thing, but in an increasingly nightmarish year, it's something I think many buyers will be thankful for.

Unlike more recent Oppo phones, the Find X2 Pro's home screen launcher lacks Google Feed integration, instead opting for the company's own Smart Assistant panel, a sort of iOS-style widget shelf that's quite underdeveloped and not a whole lot of use.

As with any highly opinionated smartphone software, there are some bugbears to note. The most irritating ColorOS feature I've encountered is the default behavior of the status bar, which doesn't show icons for all notifications. Instead, each app has to be manually toggled on. This, in turn, results in a confusing disconnect when only a handful of apps show an icon in the status bar, yet notifications from other apps may be waiting in the notification shade.

While Oppo was relatively quick to update the Find X2 Pro to Android 11, the company doesn't have a great track record for longer-term support, so further updates to Android 12 may take longer than rival brands' phones.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Cameras

Oppo cut its teeth on periscope cameras with 2019's Reno devices, and the trend of super-long telephotography continues in the Find X2 Pro. Alongside a redesigned (and much larger) main sensor and a capable ultrawide option, the phone features a second-gen 13-megapixel 5X telephoto zoom that's good at up to 10X in hybrid zoom mode.

Oppo Find X2 Pro camera specs

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All of the above hardware makes for an incredibly versatile camera setup. The main sensor isn't as large as those seen in Huawei's P40 series or Samsung's Galaxy S21 Ultra but nevertheless performs spectacularly across a wide range of scenarios.

Whether you're using the ultrawide or primary sensor, colors are consistent and accurate, with ample dynamic range even in challenging situations like shooting directly into a sunset. In portrait shots, skin tones aren't oversoftened like some Samsung phones. The new main sensor and f/1.7 lens can capture some impressive macro shots. And at night, there's plenty of color detail thanks to the automatic night mode that kicks into action.

That's part of Oppo's new AI shooting feature, called — ahem — AI Color Dazzle. Despite the cringey name, this is adept at detecting the usual array of scenes — cat, sunset, landscape, indoors, etc., and tweaking colors accordingly.

The Find X2 is a competent performer in low light, too. Although it doesn't reach the dizzy heights of Huawei's P40 series, with its enormous 1/1.28-inch sensor, I've been impressed with most of the night-time and darker indoor shots captured by the main and ultrawide sensors.

When it comes to the 5X periscope telephoto, Oppo does an admirable job in daylight and some indoor scenes, though as with most telephoto lenses like this, quality quickly degrades in night-time scenes. (It'll then revert back to a grainy 5X crop of the main sensor.)

Launching a generation into the periscope telephoto craze, Oppo's latest hardware improves further upon the concept, with a solid 10X hybrid zoom and improved fine detail compared to earlier devices like the Huawei P30 Pro. If you're unfamiliar with this kind of telephoto lens, the added versatility that usable 5X and 10X zoom brings to a smartphone camera is phenomenal, giving you impressive close-ups that often don't look like they were taken on a smartphone.

The 5X camera also provides a great showcase for Oppo's new video stabilization features in the Find X2 Pro. Oppo's software stabilization works on all the rear cameras and does an excellent job of smoothing handheld pan shots and completely eliminating hand-shake in static shots. The result is an almost magical level of stabilization, which in 5X and 10X mode is particularly impressive considering how juddery the viewfinder can become while shooting.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Competition

With unlocked prices now sitting just below the £800 mark in the UK, the Find X2 Pro finds itself going up against several great mid-tear phones of early 2021. You'll arguably get a better all-around Android experience with something like the Galaxy S21 or S20 FE, though you'll miss out on super-fast charging and the impressive 5X periscope telephoto.

Elsewhere, OnePlus also offers a more balanced product in the OnePlus 9 at a cheaper price point, with added extras like Qi wireless charging. That said, the vanilla OnePlus 9 can't compete with the Find X2 Pro on photo fidelity, and you'll want to step up to the more expensive 9 Pro (currently selling for £829) for a superior Android flagship. Both phones in the OnePlus lineup boast a newer, faster, and more efficient Snapdragon 888 processor compared to the older 865 in Oppo's device.

And then there's the Find X2 Pro's direct successor, the Find X3 Pro. It's considerably more expensive, with prices just under the £1100 mark. And while it's a better all-rounder, you'll actually get a downgraded telephoto camera compared to the X2 Pro.

Oppo Find X2 Pro Should you buy it?

Who it's for

• Photographers looking for a flagship experience for less
• Anyone looking for a flagship experience without paying top dollar

Who it's not for

• Fans of compact phones
• Anyone who needs multi-day battery life

It's really hard to fault the Oppo Find X2. This phone delivers in all the key areas you'd expect from a premium handset in its price bracket: display quality, performance, camera capabilities, and charging speeds. What's more, it establishes Oppo as a true competitor to Samsung in Western markets. Oppo goes toe-to-toe with the Korean giant, and in some areas, comes out on top. With Huawei still struggling to build out its own software ecosystem, the Find X2 Pro could replace its local rival as the go-to alternative to the Galaxy S line.

For Oppo, a few software excentricities remain, but none of the Find X2 Pro's UI and feature quirks are serious enough to detract much from the overall package. This is an exceptional phone that's worth your money just as much as the current Samsung flagships.

4.5 out of 5

It's certainly not cheap, and there is definitely better value for money to be found elsewhere, including the OnePlus 9 series. But if you're looking to spend around £700-800 on a shiny new Android handset, the Find X2 Pro should definitely be on your shortlist.

Review Changelog, April 2021

This article was originally published in March 2020. It was updated in April 2021 with the following changes.

• Updated pricing and availability to reflect current deals.
• Updated impressions on battery life from past year of usage.
• Updated software section to reflect the rollout of Android 11 and ColorOS 11.
• Updated spec table to reflect the rollout of Android 11 and ColorOS 11.
• Added section on early-2021 competitors at Find X2 Pro's current price point.